Every summer, Hungarian prime minister Viktor Orbán gives a big speech at the Bálványos Summer Free University and Student Camp in eastern Transylvania, in Romania. This year’s was particularly long and substantive. There is no doubt that Orbán intends to leave not just a policy legacy in Hungary but an intellectual legacy as well. I thought I would present some interesting passages from the speech. There are many to choose from, and some, including his comment on Hungary’s stalled family policy, did not make the cut.
Orbán recently went on a so-called peace mission, meeting with Vladimir Putin, Xi Jinping, Volodymyr Zelensky, and Donald J. Trump. Orbán has been consistent in his message that the war in Ukraine has been horrible for Hungary’s interests — namely because of its dependence on Russian oil. But he spoke admiringly of the Ukrainian resistance.
His view of the conflict is that the two main parties cannot resolve it themselves:
Firstly, the war has seen brutal losses – numbering in the hundreds of thousands – suffered by both sides. I have recently met them, and I can say with certainty that they do not want to come to terms. Why is this? There are two reasons. The first is that each of them thinks that they can win, and wants to fight until victory. The second is that both are fuelled by their own real or perceived truth. The Ukrainians think that this is a Russian invasion, a violation of international law and territorial sovereignty, and they are in fact fighting a war of self-defence for their independence. The Russians think that there have been serious NATO military developments in Ukraine, Ukraine has been promised NATO membership, and they do not want to see NATO troops or NATO weapons on the Russian–Ukrainian border. So they say that Russia has the right to self-defence, and that in fact this war has been provoked. So everyone has some kind of truth, perceived or real, and will not give up fighting the war. This is a road leading directly to escalation; if it depends on these two sides, there will be no peace. Peace can only be brought in from outside.
While also admitting that Russia has shown a surprising amount of economic and perhaps even societal resilience in the face of sanctions, Orbán commented on Ukraine’s transformed self-consciousness and its place in the world:
Ukraine’s strength, its resilience, has exceeded all expectations. After all, since 1991 eleven million people have left the country, it has been ruled by oligarchs, corruption sky-high, and the state had essentially ceased functioning. And yet now we are seeing unprecedentedly successful resistance from it. Despite the conditions described here, Ukraine is in fact a strong country. The question is what the source of this strength is. Apart from its military past and individuals’ personal heroism, there is something worth understanding here: Ukraine has found a higher purpose, it has discovered a new meaning to its existence. Because up until now, Ukraine saw itself as a buffer zone. To be a buffer zone is psychologically debilitating: there is a sense of helplessness, a feeling that one’s fate is not in one’s own hands. This is a consequence of such a doubly exposed position. Now, however, there is the dawning prospect of belonging to the West. Ukraine’s new self-authored mission is to be the West’s eastern military frontier region. The meaning and importance of its existence has increased in its own eyes and in the eyes of the whole world. This has brought it into a state of activity and action, which we non-Ukrainians see as aggressive insistence – and there’s no denying that it is quite aggressive and insistent. It is in fact the Ukrainians’ demand for their higher purpose to be officially recognised internationally. This is what gives them the strength that makes them capable of unprecedented resistance.
This is correct, and it means that even those of us who would like to see the war end soon must recognize that Ukrainians will not sell themselves short after this level of sacrifice for their nation. One of the reasons Orbán can recognize this is that his own country, in its history, transformed its self-conception from one of an Eastern people settled within and sometimes rampaging the West, to, at one time, Western Christendom’s eastern military outpost.
While surveying the international scene, I think Orbán tends to overrate China’s probable ascendance and not speak enough about India’s rise. But by far the most interesting parts of the speech were Orbán’s comments on the politics of Europe itself. He spoke of the Franco-German voice of Europe collapsing and allowing the American voice in European politics to cow them. He also explained that the whole point of the Visegrád 4 was to create an economic bloc in between German industry and Russian energy. He noted that Poland wasn’t crazy to see itself as bidding, with its increasing military power, for a more leading role in Europe. But he observes:
Talking of our Polish brothers and sisters, let us mention them here in passing. Since they have now kicked our backsides black and blue, perhaps we can allow ourselves to say a few sincere, fraternal home truths about them. Well, the Poles are pursuing the most sanctimonious and hypocritical policy in the whole of Europe. They lecture us on moral grounds, they criticise us for our economic relations with Russia, and at the same time they are blithely doing business with the Russians, buying their oil – albeit via indirect routes – and running the Polish economy with it. The French are better than that: last month, incidentally, they overtook us in gas purchases from Russia – but at least they do not lecture us on moral grounds.
He comments on the problem of the West’s own self-destructiveness — that Western Europe is acting as if nations and their borders no longer should matter, and neither should the national parliaments. Central Europe acts differently; the United States is torn between a Democratic Party that wants to join the post-national global elite and a Republican Party that is still fighting for the American interest, and which would ultimately force Europe to look after its own affairs in a more manful way. Perhaps Orbán’s most provocative comment is that the United States’ relentless promotion of the sexual revolution has robbed it of its heretofore unchallengeable soft power:
Western values – which were the essence of so-called “soft power” – have become a boomerang. It has turned out that these Western values, which were thought to be universal, are demonstratively unacceptable and rejected in ever more countries around the world. It has turned out that modernity, modern development, is not Western, or at least not exclusively Western – because China is modern, India is becoming increasingly modern, and the Arabs and Turks are modernising; and they are not becoming a modern world on the basis of Western values at all. And in the meantime Western soft power has been replaced by Russian soft power, because now the key to the propagation of Western values is LGBTQ. Anyone who does not accept this is now in the “backward” category as far as the Western world is concerned. I do not know if you have been watching, but I think it is remarkable that in the last six months pro-LGBTQ laws have been passed by countries such as Ukraine, Taiwan and Japan. But the world does not agree. Consequently, today Putin’s strongest tactical weapon is the Western imposition of LGBTQ and resistance to it, opposition to it. This has become Russia’s strongest international attraction; thus what used to be Western soft power has now been transformed into Russian soft power – like a boomerang.
From there he outlined a strategy for his own country — the economic development of national-champion industries that can compete globally, the filling out of medium-sized enterprises that grow regionally and local ones that serve the nation itself — joined to a diplomatic strategy of never shutting oneself in one single bloc but playing for the best deals available.
The tribute to openness reminds me of another small state’s economic strategy — Ireland’s. But the Hungarian difference is in the nurturing of native industries that can be globally competitive. Ireland is at the mercy of international corporations, many of whom primarily employ non-nationals, that may pick up sticks and leave.